Poland Becomes a Major Conduit for Drug Traffic

By RAYMOND BONNER,

Published: December 30, 1993

WARSAW, Dec. 29—
When four containers of fish from Nigeria arrived at the airport recently, customs officers were suspicious about the unusual cargo. Fish from Nigeria? So they searched, and they discovered, packed with the 120 pounds of carp, half a ton of marijuana worth about $2 million on the street.

A few weeks before, Polish officials on the border with Belarus seized 4.5 tons of hashish that had been secreted in a shipment of fermented raisins from Afghanistan. And earlier this year, the Costa Rican Ambassador to Poland was arrested at the Warsaw airport with nearly 25 pounds of pure heroin in his luggage, with a street value of $900,000, while another drug bust netted 220 pounds of cocaine from South America, with a value of about $7.5 million.

These drug seizures reflect a sharp increase in narcotics entering Poland. Some of it is for a growing domestic market, but most of the drugs are en route to Western Europe and even the United States, where Federal law enforcement officials have expressed alarm about heroin being smuggled into the country from Poland. The volume is expected to increase. Trafficking Throughout Region

And while law enforcement officials in Eastern Europe say Poland has become the biggest transshipment point, drug trafficking has also increased sharply throughout the region, in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, as well as in Russia.

In February, a staggering 1.2 tons of cocaine was seized in St. Petersburg, in a container of canned meat that had been sent by ship from Colombia. Russian officials believe that the cocaine was to be divided into smaller parcels and then smuggled into various Western Europe cities, where the street value would have been in excess of $75 million.

Increasingly, organized criminal elements from Russia and other former Soviet republics, where law and order has almost completely broken down, are operating in Eastern Europe. This new mafia is not only moving into other traditional organized crime fields, like prostitution, but into arms smuggling as well, often financing the purchase of weapons with their enormous drug profits, law enforcement officials say.

"It is an explosion," said Maciej Lubik, a senior Polish customs official and director of the Eastern European office of the Customs Cooperation Council, an international organization, about the growth of the drug traffic in the region. Americans 'Alarmed'

"The Americans are very, very alarmed," he said, adding that he had been working closely with officials from the United States Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

No one knows for sure the total volume of drugs now moving through Eastern Europe -- the countries have only recently begun keeping records of seizures, and they are spotty at best -- but Mr. Lubik said that at most only 5 percent of the drugs moving through Eastern Europe were being seized.

He estimated that at least 25 percent of the heroin being consumed in Western Europe was now passing through Eastern Europe, and he said that of the 30 tons of hashish seized in all of Europe this year, half had been found in Poland and Bulgaria.

At the moment, most of the drugs passing through Eastern Europe appear to be destined for users in Western Europe, but the United States is alert to the possibility that the drug traffickers will "exploit opportunities in the United States," Stephen Greene, acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said in a telephone interview from Washington.

Washington is particularly concerned by the activity of the Nigerians in Eastern Europe, he said. "They are some of the most experienced heroin traffickers in the world," he said.

Mr. Green added that his agency had gathered intelligence that organized criminal groups from the former Soviet Union were using confederates in New York and Atlanta to smuggle drugs into the United States. Collapse of Controls

Drug syndicates are turning to Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has brought an end to rigid border controls, and in the wake of the war in Yugoslavia, which has led to a disruption of traditional drug routes. And the former Communist countries, confronted by a problem they did not face until recently, are woefully unprepared, handicapped by inadequate laws, a lack of experience and paltry resources.

For the drug dealer, once he has contraband in an Eastern Europe country, he finds it easier to move it West. This is because a person landing in New York or Amsterdam or London from Prague or Warsaw is not as likely to arouse suspicion as a person arriving from Bogota, Istanbul or Lagos.

This month, the German authorities seized 638 pounds of heroin entering the country from the Czech Republic in a shipment of Turkish nuts. Worth an estimated $18 million on the street, it was the largest heroin seizure ever in Germany, officials said. It was 200 pounds more than was seized in the record heroin seizure in New York in December.

In October, at the Black Sea port of Constantin, Romanian customs officials seized 9,196 pounds of hashish, worth just over $20 million on the street in Western Europe, packed in tea shipped from Kenya on a Uganda-registered ship. Three days later, they found 13,838 pounds of hashish, worth about $31 million, on another Ugandan freighter, this time secreted among textiles. A Number of Routes